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Mr. Downtown Moves On

TO anyone else, it would just be a barstool. But to Taavo Somer, it was a conundrum.

One prototype had misfired and looked, to his exacting architect-trained eye, more Abner Doubleday than Paul McCobb (“like a baseball diamond,” he snorted). Another version, fashioned from found wood, looked “scrappy” and clashed with the “primitive modern” aesthetic he was striving for.

A subsequent iteration, which was streamlined and vaguely Scandinavian, was almost there. “Through osmosis, it’s kind of Wharton Esherick,” he said, referring to the postwar sculptor and furniture designer known for his fantastical wooden creations.

But Mr. Somer — godfather of urban woodsman, high priest of heritage chic — could not quite let it go. He put his safety goggles on, picked up his router and went back to work on a block of English elm.

Mr. Somer is the rare restaurateur who not only designs his own restaurants, but hand-builds the tiniest details, down to the door closer for the bathroom; instead of an off-the-shelf model, he fashioned a pulley system using a potted cactus as a weight. And on this warm summer Thursday, he was drenched in sweat and sawdust at his cavernous workshop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a few blocks from Isa, the highly anticipated restaurant he is opening next week.

Every detail at Isa has to be just so. Design decisions matters a little more when you’re Taavo, because whenever he does something — whether it’s taxidermy, plaid shirts or Edwardian-esque bartenders — everyone south of 14th Street is going to analyze it for seismic cultural shifts.

Ironic beards? Navy watch caps? Vintage-style suits cut from deadstock wool? Those trends might have never taken hold without Mr. Somer, the guiding force behind a retro-macho empire that includes Freemans restaurant, Freemans Sporting Club and the Rusty Knot.

So what’s next for Mr. Somer, a man who styles himself as a kind of anti-celebrity, and whom Sean MacPherson, the pioneering downtown impresario, once called “the patron saint of hipsters” in New York?

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Taavo Somer and his father, Toivo, at Taavo's Brooklyn woodshop, where he works on details for his new restaurant.Credit
Robert Wright for The New York Times

It may come as a surprise to learn that Mr. Somer is getting sick of New York. Yes, one of downtown’s most imitated tastemakers of the last decade is itching to leave the very place where he made his mark. Being a husband and the father of a 5-month-old daughter, he said, has put things in a new perspective.

Isa “might be the last project that I’ll do in the city, and I feel like it might be the last restaurant I do,” said Mr. Somer, who turned 38 in April.

But if Isa, which he considers his most personal project ever, is to be his swan song, he plans to get the details exactly right.

FOR months, foodie blogs have been abuzz: What’s Taavo up to in Williamsburg? If not irony-tinged retro Americana, what?

For one thing, not another Freemans. The restaurant, which he opened in 2004 with William Tigertt, stood the then-prevailing night life aesthetic — a cold, plastic minimalism — on its head. Tucked at the end of a “hidden” alley off the Bowery, the restaurant was modeled after a Colonial country inn, filled with ye-olde design touches including brass chandeliers and enough taxidermy to feel like the Lower East Side outpost of Deyrolle, the fabled Parisian shop.

But pretty soon, it would become its own design cliché. Everyone was doing deer heads, pressed tin ceilings, antique mirrors and industrial lamps, not only at restaurants in the East Village and Williamsburg, but also in homes in Berlin, Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro.

“They all became so old-time-y and themed,” Mr. Somer said. “And all the people working in them were all like handlebar-mustached actors living in this set, and all the waitresses were all, like, with perfect dresses from the ’40s.”

The neo-Americana craze went beyond restaurants, especially after he opened Freemans Sporting Club in 2005, a men’s boutique that channeled a hunting lodge. Every other guy on the L train started looking like Taavo’s lost twin: the lumberjack whiskers, the rolled selvedge jeans, the flannel shirts weaved from organic cotton.

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Taavo Somer with planks of walnut in a photo inspired by John Loengard's 1969 Life image of the Japanese architect George Nakashima, who influenced Mr. Somer.Credit
Robert Wright for The New York Times

“Taavo didn’t create those trends, but he crystallized those trends and created a moment,” said Todd Selby, the style photographer who shoots the interiors of cultural figures’ homes worldwide. “These trends are global: the Americana, the taxidermy, which is another aspect of Freemans.”

Mr. Somer was a trendsetter of circumstance, not by some grand design. The only child of Estonian immigrants, he was born in Detroit and raised in Chadds Ford, Pa., a semi-rural township outside Philadelphia known for its Revolutionary War battlefields.

His parents weren’t hippies, but their home took a page from the Whole Earth Catalog. His dad, Toivo, an aerospace engineer, built the house by hand and installed solar panels. His mother, Tiia Rettig, made her own jam and yogurt.

In 2001, Mr. Somer moved to New York to become an architect at a large firm, but quit after six months. He called Serge Becker, the nightclub designer he met through a former colleague. At the time, Mr. Becker was renovating the Lever House restaurant on Park Avenue and put Mr. Somer in charge of managing construction.

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It was his first taste of being a restaurateur and he was hooked. Meanwhile, he was making a name for himself in downtown creative circles, designing smirky T-shirts that sold at Barneys and holding in-the-know parties at the Pussycat Lounge, a strip club in the financial district.

When Mr. Somer opened Freemans with its scruffy, hunter-chic accouterments and haute comfort food, it tapped into an emerging sensibility that ran away from anything sleek and minimal. It also made Mr. Somer into something of the face for this irony-laced bohemian trend.

A nouveau heritage men’s boutique and a ’20s-style barbershop (conceived and operated by Sam Buffa) would follow. Then the Rusty Knot, a nautical-theme dive bar in the West Village, which he opened with Ken Friedman of the Spotted Pig. While countless restaurants copied his style, he had a direct hand in two others: Gemma, a stylish trattoria he designed at the Bowery Hotel, and Peels, his haute country outpost down the block on the Bowery.

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Mr. Somer working the room at Freemans, which helped spur the taxidermy craze.Credit
Rahav Segev for The New York Times

But the cool little empire came at a cost. The carefree bohemian life that Mr. Somer envisioned was no more. As he saw it, his wasn’t a glamorous life of artistic pursuits, endless parties and trendcasting. Rather, he logged 16-hour days juggling three restaurants, hauled garbage at midnight and fought continuously with neighbors and city agencies.

“In New York, it’s like you are lucky if you can be creative for three hours a week, and then the other 100 hours you’re just slaving away,” he said.

Other changes were afoot. Two years ago, he married his longtime girlfriend, Courtney McGuinness (now Ms. Somer), a dimpled brunette who works for a branding company. Their first child, Tessa, was born in April.

Instead of chasing what’s next, he found himself growing beets in the garden of their country house in Accord in the Catskills, just like his dad did. Or trolling eBay for Danish pottery, just like his dad. Or installing a geothermal pump at the country house, just like his dad. He even found himself drawn to the 1970s, back-to-the-land aesthetic that once made him squirm.

AFTER finishing up at the wood shop, he brushed the sawdust from his shoulders and hopped on his bike, a charcoal-gray 10-speed with hammered brass fenders. Wearing baggy herringbone train-engineer pants, rolled halfway up the calf, with desert boots, no socks, he pedaled the 10 blocks to Isa, which was having a soft opening for friends.

The beard that launched a thousand beards has been trimmed back to something approximating a goatee. He looked weary, like any parent with a 5-month-old daughter at home.

Dinner service was hours away, and the chef Ignacio Mattos was prepping in the open kitchen, which faced a large garage-style door that was open to the sidewalk.

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F.S.C. Barber in the West Village, an offshoot of the Freemans empire.Credit
Joshua Bright for The New York Times

Compared with Freemans, the place was practically minimal. There were no stuffed boars’ heads or antlers. Rather, it was airy and rustic, like a treehouse that Mies van der Rohe might have built for his kids.

The ceiling was clad in darkened slats of knotty pine. Firewood was stacked along one wall. A slender slab of English elm extended the length of the bar. And in neat rows were those exquisitely handcrafted chairs, faintly Scandinavian, thoroughly artisanal and hyper-authentic by design.

“Hippie, not hipster,” was how one food blog summed up the space.

Unlike past projects, there was also a sense of earnestness. There were no tongue-in-cheek touches, but that may change. He’s planning to include some totems from his childhood, like macramé and yarn art, and to pipe in recordings of woodland bird and crickets.

It’s a typical Taavo wink. Also, it’s a consciously corny homage to his parents’ crafts in the ’70s. “We might be really cheesy, but when you’re in here it’s O.K. to be cheesy,” Mr. Somer said, over a San Pellegrino on the rooftop garden. “We actually do want to encourage and foster a naïve sort of goofiness that didn’t seem possible in Manhattan.”

Which is why the restaurant is in Brooklyn. “It’s ‘Escape From New York,’ ” he said. Indeed, every step from away from the Lower East Side is a step away from a role he’s tired of playing: the ur-hipster.

“The only time I’ve ever heard the word ‘hipster’ discussed is by journalists,” he said, rolling his eyes. To him, hipsterdom is a condition of man. “Haven’t they always existed throughout time?” he asked. “Wasn’t there, like, a hipster caveman? Like, ‘Oh, those cave paintings, you should see these cave paintings over here. Bob’s cave paintings are way better.’ ”

If Isa takes off, his next project might take him even further from the cool confines of downtown Manhattan. He’s ready to dial it down a notch, outside the city that created the myth of Taavo. That could be in Berlin; it could be in Portland. Or maybe even closer.